OUR DISAPPOINTING DOMAIN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17270, 20 September 1919, Page 1 (Supplement)

OUR DISAPPOINTING DOMAIN

NEED FOR NATURE'S GARDEN.

BT HILDA KEANB.

I walked • from Parnell towards the Domain. Spring was in the fleecy sky, and the wind was keen. In little front gardens, primroses were budding, clumps of creamy and yellow jonquils, freesias, and golden daffodils flung their scented defiance at the rain. Scilla made pools of blue; and somewhere grape hyacinths ringed, most royally, their paler sisters. Dusty highway and house wall daunted not these brave flowers. A curving drive led to the Domain, giving a sense of beautiful Nature, and the comfort that space brings. But with it was something unsatisfying. I sought the reason. Not solitude, for even here motor-horns shrill the air, and their spinning wheels came swishing. To the right fell tangled bush; to the left a moorland. This gave the clue. On it were broken fencing, grass grown to foot-tripping roughness, and a few straggling trees. Below were the manukas, pathetic on a clipped sward; a band rotunda; and, hideous in its glazen emptiness, a " winter garden," relic of Victorian and 'Crystal Palace days. And, guarded by iron railings and gate, a sunny garden! A Gardener's Garden.

There is a fine irony about our public gardener. He will leave a valuable monstrosity of glass open to the small boy's stone, while he locks from the sight of timorous women and peace-seeking lovers, such things as begonias and ferns. But to-day, when _ I had passed the useless clipped hedge' I found the gates open. Following in the wake of a party of students, I' stole among the primulas, said a greeting to the washed palms, and over a group of shoulders, captured some glimpses of orchids. A warden solemnly held the portal, murmured heavily, in reply to a query, some farrago about " two hundred pounds," and, when the last maiden had lingeringly filed out, solemnly and surely turned the key. An interloper, I fled to the garden. Iron seats, a shabby cottage, neat plots, wired round, a seedling stock, candytuft, and, by curious accident, a dumber of beds of blooming anemone and ranunculi. No daffodils, no hyacinths, no primroses, no violets, no —these simple things that we love? No—if we except a neglected corner of jonquils, daffodils, and unsightly roots of grass, not looking at all merely untidy, neglected, degraded aristocrats. Some fine old trees, the remains of earlier days, two or three rhododendrons in impudent, challenging bloom—- the garden, trailing off into a slope slightly Eke a rubbish, tip. The Upland Spaces. What makes the disappointment of the Domain The bush is pleasing, merging, as it does, into those lower slopes, so charming with the spring-tide delicacy and the autumn glory of their deciduous trees., Not there the doubt, but up here, where the sun asks his opportunity, it lies. The manuka is dying of a broken heart. No iron rings will stop its' rending nor arrest its death. A sociable tree, it craves the forest undergrowth, or, failing that, the comfort of clustering. Our gardeners who spend so much time potting and planting candytuft seedlings, might try the experiment of, transplanting tea-tree, keeping it in clumps, to re place those beautiful but rapidly-dying monarchs, whose age resents their stripping. The garden fails us, and the upland spaces hold no welcome. Let us dream of the Domain a generation hence, when all the Victorian gardeners are dead, and a new race of flower-lovers has grown up. Gardening then will not mean beds of cineraria, beds of stock and phlox, beds of this and that; it will not mean beauty torn out, when it is most luxuriant, because it is time to plant few next season. Oh, you jobbing gardeners! Don't we know you, with your shears and your devastating hoe and rake?— whom profusion is untidiness, and to whom geraniums are weeds, for whom primrose and violet bloom in vain, to whom the only prizes are expensive " novelties," and swards and hedges clipped to the- bone.

British Gardening. A wood carpeted with scilla, bluebells, wood-hyacinth, - which name you will, primroses putting out rain-washed faces, banks and hedges ringing foxglove bells, old double daffodils, and -scented odorous fragrant- pinks and hedge-rows all such treasured memories to Britishers. Flaunting scarlet poppies, making summer' battlefields, " hollyhocks, meadowsweet daisies, all the rest of the pretty weeds, easily kept within bounds by good gar deners. We throw down, in Auckland, a stem of rambler rose, and find it rooted Yet though street fences have roses, no public garden descends to ramblers. But in Scarborough Cemetery, where we should have a dank, dismal place of woe. I saw, one summer, canopies of these crimson and pink beauties. Even Kew, beloved of the botanical gardens, proserves spreading acres of bluebell, and within its boundaries gorse struggles to grow. London window boxes are gay with lobelia, daisy, calceolaria. Buckingham Palace frames itself, -fittingly, with crimson geranium. And as for the gardens—Hampton Court, a very public and accessible place, who can ever forget the massing of colour with tulips, azalea, myosotis, and a score of other delightful schemes ? Oh ! they know how to garden in Britain, and how to leave wild things alone. Our gardeners should be sent there to learn.

Suggestions lor Town-planners. Of our Domain, I would have people say : " Come to see the bluebells under the manuka!" and our souls should drink in their soft blueness, and feel healed thereby. I would drive them past banks of flaming nasturtium in summer, and in spring through avenues of shy primroses. Violets should scent the air from their clustering at the forest edges; azalea, rhododendron, and other gay shrubs should laugh back to the sun where now that glazen horror burns. I would have arcades of roses, chains of wistaria flung from tree to tree; I would have sheets of .Richardia; and if I could not induce pink may, and lilac, and golden laburnum, grow as they grow about English roads. I would capture the triumphs of our common gardens, and so replace the failures. I would exchange that incongruous mixture in the garden's corner with a cultivated bed of M. J. Berkelev, or Empress, any one of the now wellknown cultured daffodils, and where the slope becomes a tip, I would have a real wild garden, not of half-a-dozen things growing higgledy-piggledy, but of selected " weeds," according to their season. And I would have beds of formal lachenalia, ringed with the royal-blue grape hyacinth, or with delicate primula I would remember the beauty of the chaineffect with polyanthus; I would have plots of violets, and ? would not make beds of white candytuft. Nor would I hide the hothouses behind bolted gates. I would have the poorest waif gaze upon the brilliance of begonias, or the quaintness of orchids, or the cool green of ferns. The waste things of the garden ? The geranium clippings, the thousand bulbs and cuttings There is room for all along the sheltered walks of the Domain; among the trees, in the glades, on the hills. And there is a typical lane in Titoki Street, off the Drive, where now refuse that will not grow is thrown. There I would plant all the things we love. The sombre, ugly privet that surrounds the tennis court —why do we hide tennis courts?—should go; and a flowering hedge should bound the lane where now are rotting posts of timber. Indeed, I think that we shall have to import some Japs, to teach us the beauty of things that bloom for the concealment of human errors.